CHAPTER XIII
It was not until the night of our first day on the south bank of theriver that we discovered the Fire People. What must have been a band ofwandering hunters went into camp not far from the tree in which Lop-Earand I had elected to roost for the night. The voices of the FirePeople at first alarmed us, but later, when darkness had come, we wereattracted by the fire. We crept cautiously and silently from tree totree till we got a good view of the scene.
In an open space among the trees, near to the river, the fire wasburning. About it were half a dozen Fire-Men. Lop-Ear clutched mesuddenly, and I could feel him tremble. I looked more closely, and sawthe wizened little old hunter who had shot Broken-Tooth out of the treeyears before. When he got up and walked about, throwing fresh wood uponthe fire, I saw that he limped with his crippled leg. Whatever it was,it was a permanent injury. He seemed more dried up and wizened thanever, and the hair on his face was quite gray.
The other hunters were young men. I noted, lying near them on theground, their bows and arrows, and I knew the weapons for what theywere. The Fire-Men wore animal skins around their waists and acrosstheir shoulders. Their arms and legs, however, were bare, and they woreno footgear. As I have said before, they were not quite so hairy as weof the Folk. They did not have large heads, and between them and theFolk there was very little difference in the degree of the slant of thehead back from the eyes.
They were less stooped than we, less springy in their movements. Theirbackbones and hips and knee-joints seemed more rigid. Their arms werenot so long as ours either, and I did not notice that they ever balancedthemselves when they walked, by touching the ground on either side withtheir hands. Also, their muscles were more rounded and symmetrical thanours, and their faces were more pleasing. Their nose orifices openeddownward; likewise the bridges of their noses were more developed, didnot look so squat nor crushed as ours. Their lips were less flabby andpendent, and their eye-teeth did not look so much like fangs. However,they were quite as thin-hipped as we, and did not weigh much more. Takeit all in all, they were less different from us than were we fromthe Tree People. Certainly, all three kinds were related, and not soremotely related at that.
The fire around which they sat was especially attractive. Lop-Ear andI sat for hours, watching the flames and smoke. It was most fascinatingwhen fresh fuel was thrown on and showers of sparks went flying upward.I wanted to come closer and look at the fire, but there was no way. Wewere crouching in the forks of a tree on the edge of the open space, andwe did not dare run the risk of being discovered.
The Fire-Men squatted around the fire and slept with their heads bowedforward on their knees. They did not sleep soundly. Their ears twitchedin their sleep, and they were restless. Every little while one oranother got up and threw more wood upon the fire. About the circle oflight in the forest, in the darkness beyond, roamed hunting animals.Lop-Ear and I could tell them by their sounds. There were wild dogsand a hyena, and for a time there was a great yelping and snarling thatawakened on the instant the whole circle of sleeping Fire-Men.
Once a lion and a lioness stood beneath our tree and gazed out withbristling hair and blinking eyes. The lion licked his chops and wasnervous with eagerness, as if he wanted to go forward and make a meal.But the lioness was more cautious. It was she that discovered us, andthe pair stood and looked up at us, silently, with twitching, scentingnostrils. Then they growled, looked once again at the fire, and turnedaway into the forest.
For a much longer time Lop-Ear and I remained and watched. Now andagain we could hear the crashing of heavy bodies in the thickets andunderbrush, and from the darkness of the other side, across the circle,we could see eyes gleaming in the firelight. In the distance we hearda lion roar, and from far off came the scream of some stricken animal,splashing and floundering in a drinking-place. Also, from the river,came a great grunting of rhinoceroses.
In the morning, after having had our sleep, we crept back to the fire.It was still smouldering, and the Fire-Men were gone. We made a circlethrough the forest to make sure, and then we ran to the fire. I wantedto see what it was like, and between thumb and finger I picked upa glowing coal. My cry of pain and fear, as I dropped it, stampededLop-Ear into the trees, and his flight frightened me after him.
The next time we came back more cautiously, and we avoided the glowingcoals. We fell to imitating the Fire-Men. We squatted down by the fire,and with heads bent forward on our knees, made believe to sleep. Then wemimicked their speech, talking to each other in their fashion and makinga great gibberish. I remembered seeing the wizened old hunter poke thefire with a stick. I poked the fire with a stick, turning up masses oflive coals and clouds of white ashes. This was great sport, and soon wewere coated white with the ashes.
It was inevitable that we should imitate the Fire-Men in replenishingthe fire. We tried it first with small pieces of wood. It was a success.The wood flamed up and crackled, and we danced and gibbered withdelight. Then we began to throw on larger pieces of wood. We put onmore and more, until we had a mighty fire. We dashed excitedly back andforth, dragging dead limbs and branches from out the forest. The flamessoared higher and higher, and the smoke-column out-towered the trees.There was a tremendous snapping and crackling and roaring. It was themost monumental work we had ever effected with our hands, and we wereproud of it. We, too, were Fire-Men, we thought, as we danced there,white gnomes in the conflagration.
The dried grass and underbrush caught fire, but we did not notice it.Suddenly a great tree on the edge of the open space burst into flames.
We looked at it with startled eyes. The heat of it drove us back.Another tree caught, and another, and then half a dozen. We werefrightened. The monster had broken loose. We crouched down in fear,while the fire ate around the circle and hemmed us in. Into Lop-Ear'seyes came the plaintive look that always accompanied incomprehension,and I know that in my eyes must have been the same look. We huddled,with our arms around each other, until the heat began to reach us andthe odor of burning hair was in our nostrils. Then we made a dash of it,and fled away westward through the forest, looking back and laughing aswe ran.
By the middle of the day we came to a neck of land, made, as weafterward discovered, by a great curve of the river that almostcompleted a circle. Right across the neck lay bunched several low andpartly wooded hills. Over these we climbed, looking backward at theforest which had become a sea of flame that swept eastward before arising wind. We continued to the west, following the river bank, andbefore we knew it we were in the midst of the abiding-place of the FirePeople.
This abiding-place was a splendid strategic selection. It was apeninsula, protected on three sides by the curving river. On onlyone side was it accessible by land. This was the narrow neck of thepeninsula, and here the several low hills were a natural obstacle.Practically isolated from the rest of the world, the Fire People musthave here lived and prospered for a long time. In fact, I think it wastheir prosperity that was responsible for the subsequent migration thatworked such calamity upon the Folk. The Fire People must have increasedin numbers until they pressed uncomfortably against the bounds of theirhabitat. They were expanding, and in the course of their expanding theydrove the Folk before them, and settled down themselves in the caves andoccupied the territory that we had occupied.
But Lop-Ear and I little dreamed of all this when we found ourselves inthe Fire People's stronghold. We had but one idea, and that was to getaway, though we could not forbear humoring our curiosity by peeping outupon the village. For the first time we saw the women and children ofthe Fire People. The latter ran for the most part naked, though theformer wore skins of wild animals.
The Fire People, like ourselves, lived in caves. The open space in frontof the caves sloped down to the river, and in the open space burned manysmall fires. But whether or not the Fire People cooked their food, I donot know. Lop-Ear and I did not see them cook. Yet it is my opinion thatthey surely must have performed some sort of rude cookery. Like us, theycarried water in gourds
from the river. There was much coming and going,and loud cries made by the women and children. The latter played aboutand cut up antics quite in the same way as did the children of the Folk,and they more nearly resembled the children of the Folk than did thegrown Fire People resemble the grown Folk.
Lop-Ear and I did not linger long. We saw some of the part-grown boysshooting with bow and arrow, and we sneaked back into the thicker forestand made our way to the river. And there we found a catamaran, a realcatamaran, one evidently made by some Fire-Man. The two logs were smalland straight, and were lashed together by means of tough roots andcrosspieces of wood.
This time the idea occurred simultaneously to us. We were trying toescape out of the Fire People's territory. What better way than bycrossing the river on these logs? We climbed on board and shoved off. Asudden something gripped the catamaran and flung it downstream violentlyagainst the bank. The abrupt stoppage almost whipped us off into thewater. The catamaran was tied to a tree by a rope of twisted roots. Thiswe untied before shoving off again.
By the time we had paddled well out into the current, we had driftedso far downstream that we were in full view of the Fire People'sabiding-place. So occupied were we with our paddling, our eyes fixedupon the other bank, that we knew nothing until aroused by a yell fromthe shore. We looked around. There were the Fire People, many of them,looking at us and pointing at us, and more were crawling out of thecaves. We sat up to watch, and forgot all about paddling. There was agreat hullabaloo on the shore. Some of the Fire-Men discharged theirbows at us, and a few of the arrows fell near us, but the range was toogreat.
It was a great day for Lop-Ear and me. To the east the conflagrationwe had started was filling half the sky with smoke. And here we were,perfectly safe in the middle of the river, encircling the Fire People'sstronghold. We sat and laughed at them as we dashed by, swinging south,and southeast to east, and even to northeast, and then east again,southeast and south and on around to the west, a great double curvewhere the river nearly tied a knot in itself.
As we swept on to the west, the Fire People far behind, a familiar sceneflashed upon our eyes.
It was the great drinking-place, where we had wandered once or twice towatch the circus of the animals when they came down to drink. Beyondit, we knew, was the carrot patch, and beyond that the caves and theabiding-place of the horde. We began to paddle for the bank thatslid swiftly past, and before we knew it we were down upon thedrinking-places used by the horde. There were the women and children,the water carriers, a number of them, filling their gourds. At sight ofus they stampeded madly up the run-ways, leaving behind them a trail ofgourds they had dropped.
We landed, and of course we neglected to tie up the catamaran, whichfloated off down the river. Right cautiously we crept up a run-way.The Folk had all disappeared into their holes, though here and therewe could see a face peering out at us. There was no sign of Red-Eye. Wewere home again. And that night we slept in our own little cave highup on the cliff, though first we had to evict a couple of pugnaciousyoungsters who had taken possession.